1a.Objectives (from AD-416):
The purpose of this agreement is to develop a commodity food database, hereinafter the Food Commodity Economic Database (FCED) for What We Eat In America, NHANES 2005-2006. The FCED, an expansion of the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies 3.0 developed by FSRG to code and process WWEIA, NHANES 2005-2006 dietary data, is designed to convert foods reported in WWEIA, NHANES 2005-2006 to ERS food commodities.

1b.Approach (from AD-416):
Staff at the Food Surveys Research Group, ARS, will work with a senior economist at the Food Economic Division, ERS, to plan, develop, and document the development of FCED and collaborate with ERS in the preparation of manuscripts on common areas of interest to ARS and ERS.

The 2005-2006 FCED will be applied to 2005-2006 WWEIA, NHANES dietary recall data to estimate the amount of food commodities consumed by Americans. Various USDA reports will be prepared by staff at ERS and ARS. The FCED database will be made publicly available on the Web.

3.Progress Report:

This agreement is to develop a database that allows foods in the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) used for the national dietary intake surveys to be translated into retail commodities in order to report on food consumption by those commodities. A retail commodity is defined as a selected form of a food that is available for purchase in retail stores, supermarkets, or other retail food outlets (e.g., orange with peel, raw boneless beef). The Food Intakes Converted to Retail Commodities Database (FICRCD), which is referred to as the Food Consumption Economic Database (FCED) in the agreement, has been developed by converting the more than 7,000 unique foods included in the FNDDS into respective amounts of 65 retail commodities by disaggregating those foods into ingredients where necessary, assigning foods/ingredients to the retail commodity groups and applying conversion factors as appropriate, and computing amounts of each of the 65 retail commodities present in 100 grams of survey food. The list of 65 retail commodities was jointly determined by scientists at ARS and economists at the Economic Research Service.

A unique database and a related summary data table set that converts foods consumed to retail-level commodities using the database for What We Eat in America, NHANES 2005-2006 were developed and released on the FSRG Web site. In addition, a Methodology and User Guide for the FICRCD 2005-2006 was also developed and released that describes the process of disaggregation of foods, their assignments to appropriate commodities, and the application of conversion factors to convert foods to respective amounts of commodities. The methodology used for the FICRCD 2005-2006 was comparable to that used for developing FICRCD for the survey years of 1994-1998, 1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004 that were also developed and released on the FSRG Web site under this agreement.